All available surfaces seem to be invested. At this point of the movie is met for the first time a very important element, one of the most unquestionable urbanity factor: land pressure. An intense activity is conveyed on the screen by numerous site works around, while the omnipresent murals and graffitis and unauthorised poster campaigns demonstrate the value of blank surfaces. The current urban ring is hybrid, despite being peripheral, it is dynamic. The industrial heritage is renovated, but its valorisation isn’t specifically staged, so the city isn’t mummified, unlike many European city centre. The urbanisation therefore remains free, uncontrolled, which is a characteristic of the suburb, land of experimentations et innovations. Faubourgs codes are well visible: terraced houses spreading as far as the eye can see, warehouses, garden plots, wide sport infrastructure, and railways in service. Still, few collective housings. The Railway Path is a green channel cutting through a labyrinthic roads network, which make the passage attractive as it is the only direct route to the city centre. The borough is highly zoned (1) yet the allotments aren’t bedroom community, there indeed exists a rich programmatic mixing.
With this apparent effervescence comes an augmentation of the uses density. There are now as many, if not more pedestrians than cyclists. The average trip distance of the typical user is falling deeply, and the accesses are more and more frequent.
(1) Zoning :
"Refers to conception of urban planning elaborated in Boston in 1912 at the 4th Nat. Conference City Planning. Regulation organising the repartition of a territory in zones and setting for each of them the nature and the conditions of the ground use."